Snapshots of some of the latest peer-reviewed
research within psychology and related fields.

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n When helping strangers, atheists are
more motivated by compassion than
religious people, according to a study
by University of California, Berkeley,
researchers. In one of the study’s three
experiments, more than 200 college
students reported how compassionate
they felt. Then they played “economic
trust games” in which they were given
money to share — or not — with a
stranger. Participants who scored low
on the religiosity scale and high on
momentary compassion were more
inclined to share their winnings with
strangers than other study participants.
(Social Psychological and Personality
Science, online April 26)

Workers who took a five-day vacation from email had more natural heart rates and
reported feeling less stress, a study finds.

n Taking an email vacation while onthe job can boost job productivityand reduce stress, suggests research byscientists at the University of California,Irvine, and the U.S. Army, presentedat a meeting of the Association forComputing Machinery in May. Inthe study, 13 information technologyworkers agreed to ignore work emailsfor five days. Researchers found thatthe co-workers who continued readingemails had more constant elevated heartrates, while the “vacationers” had morenatural, variable heart rates. The emailvacationers also reported feeling lessstress and being better able to do theirjobs and stay on task.

n Anxiety increases cancer severityin mice, according to a study ledby Stanford University researchers.Scientists exposed hairless mice toultraviolet rays for 10-minute boutsthree times a week for 10 weeks —exposure similar to that of humans whospend too much time in the sun. Afterseveral months, all the mice developedskin cancer, but the nervous ones —those with a proclivity for reticence andrisk aversion, as determined by previousbehavioral tests — had more tumorsthan the calmer mice and were the onlyones to develop invasive forms of cancer.(PLoS ONE, online April 25)

n Depressed mothers are more likelyto needlessly wake their babies at nightthan non-depressed moms, accordingto researchers at Pennsylvania StateUniversity. The researchers collecteddata over seven days on 45 babies,age 1 month to 2 years, and theirparents. At the start of the week, the